The link between Science and Religion in Islam: 2007/04

Saturday, April 28, 2007

170)Time out! Updated index to my blogsite.

Time out! Updated index to my blogsite:

Posts relating to religious doctrine: 1, 2, 3 ,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 20, 22, 27, 33, 34, 35, 46, 48, 49, 50, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74, 82, 86, 95, 98, 100, 103, 106, 112, 114, 129, 133, 135, 136, 145, 163, 180.

Posts relating to objects and events in nature(science): 13, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 40, 42, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 75, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 97, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130, 132, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 149, 159, 160, 164, 166, 169, 173, 175.

Posts relating to both: 12, 14, 19, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 51, 52, 55, 61, 62, 69, 73, 76, 77, 81, 85, 89, 91, 93, 96, 104, 105, 108, 113, 118, 122, 124, 126, 127, 131, 134, 144, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 167, 168, 170, 176, 177, 178, 179.

Posts relating to neither: 78, 101, 125, 138, 174.

Special collections of posts:

A)Ayats(Signs) in the Universe Series: 19, 29, 31, 38, 39, 41, 127.

B)Posts relating specifically to the subject of Astronomy: 23, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 42, 47, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 75, 83, 84, 85, 90, 92, 94, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130, 132, 134, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 151, 159, 161, 164, 165, 166, 169.

C)Posts relating to individual scientists, philosophers, cosmologists and poets, both inside and outside the Islamic tradition: 1, 11, 16, 20, 26, 27, 43, 44, 48, 55, 56, 57, 104, 108, 128, 130, 135, 150, 157, 158, 162, 178.

D)Posts relating to my China Series: 171, 172, 174.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

Friday, April 27, 2007

169)"One hour of contemplation on the works of the Creator is better than a thousand hours of prayer."

What a work of art from the Maker of the Universe! This immaculate spiral galaxy is 118 million trillion kilometers away from us, very similar in size to our own Milky Way galaxy and reminds me of the following saying of the Prophet Mohammed:

"One hour of contemplation on the works of the Creator is better than a thousand hours of prayer":

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070427.html

Meanwhile, much closer to home, a mere 200 thousand million kilometers away, an aging star has been found that has 3 planets orbiting around it. The closest planet to this star has been found to be the most earth-like of all the 200 or so planets found outside our solar system so far:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070426.html

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

168)The underlying ethos of this blogsite.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

167)The Link between Science and Religion in Islam: a timely discussion of a topic that is going global.

Evolution and religion

In the beginning

Apr 19th 2007
ISTANBUL, MOSCOW AND ROME
From The Economist print edition

The debate over creation and evolution, once most conspicuous in America, is fast going global.

THE “Atlas of Creation” runs to 770 pages and is lavishly illustrated with photographs of fossils and living animals, interlaced with quotations from the Koran. Its author claims to prove not only the falsehood of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, but the links between “Darwinism” and such diverse evils as communism, fascism and terrorism. In recent weeks the “Atlas de la Création” has been arriving unsolicited and free of charge at schools and universities across French-speaking Europe. It is the latest sign of a revolt against the theories of Darwin, on which virtually the whole of modern biology is based, that is gathering momentum in many parts of the world.

The mass distribution of a French version of the “Atlas” (already published in English and Turkish) typifies the style of an Istanbul publishing house whose sole business is the dissemination, in many languages, of scores of works by a single author, a charismatic but controversial Turkish preacher who writes as Harun Yahya but is really called Adnan Oktar. According to a Turkish scientist who now lives in America, the movement founded by Mr Oktar is “powerful, global and very well financed”. Translations of Mr Oktar's work into tongues like Arabic, Urdu and Bahasa Indonesia have ensured a large following in Muslim countries.

In his native Turkey there are many people, including devout Muslims, who feel uncomfortable about the 51-year-old Mr Oktar's strong appeal to young women and his political sympathies for the nationalist right. But across the Muslim world he seems to be riding high. Many of the most popular Islamic websites refer readers to his vast canon.

In the more prosperous parts of the historically Christian world, Mr Oktar's flamboyant style would be unappealing, even to religious believers. Among mainstream Catholics and liberal Protestants, clerical pronouncements on creation and evolution are often couched in careful—and for many people, almost impenetrable—theological language. For example, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the world's 80m Anglicans, has dismissed literal readings of the Creation story in Genesis as a “category mistake”. But no such highbrow reticence holds back the more zealous Christian movements in the developing world, where the strongest religious medicine seems to go down best.

In Kenya, for example, there is a bitter controversy over plans to put on display the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human being ever found, a figure known as Turkana Boy—along with a collection of fossils, some of which may be as much as 200m years old. Bishop Boniface Adoyo, an evangelical leader who claims to speak for 35 denominations and 10m believers, has denounced the proposed exhibit, asserting that: “I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it.”

Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who unearthed both the skeleton and the fossils in northern Kenya, is adamant that the show must go on. “Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his,” Mr Leakey has insisted. Local Catholics have backed him.

Rows over religion and reason are also raging in Russia. In recent weeks the Russian Orthodox Church has backed a family in St Petersburg who (unsuccessfully) sued the education authorities for teaching only about evolution to explain the origins of life. Plunging into deep scientific waters, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, Father Vsevolod Chaplin, said Darwin's theory of evolution was “based on pretty strained argumentation”—and that physical evidence cited in its support “can never prove that one biological species can evolve into another.”

A much more nuanced critique, not of Darwin himself but of secular world-views based on Darwin's ideas, has been advanced by Pope Benedict XVI, the conservative Bavarian who assumed the most powerful office in the Christian world two years ago. The pope marked his 80th birthday this week by publishing a book on Jesus Christ. But for Vatican-watchers, an equally important event was the issue in German, a few days earlier, of a book in which the pontiff and several key advisers expound their views on the emergence of the universe and life. While avoiding the cruder arguments that have been used to challenge Darwin's theories, the pope asserts that evolution cannot be conclusively proved; and that the manner in which life developed was indicative of a “divine reason” which could not be discerned by scientific methods alone.

Both in his previous role as the chief enforcer of Catholic doctrine and since his enthronement, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has made clear his profound belief that man has a unique, God-given role in the animal kingdom; and that a divine creator has an ongoing role in sustaining the universe, something far more than just “lighting the blue touch paper” for the Big Bang, the event that scientists think set the universe in motion.

Yesterday America, today the world

As these examples from around the world show, the debate over creation, evolution and religion is rapidly going global. Until recently, all the hottest public arguments had taken place in the United States, where school boards in many districts and states tried to restrict the teaching of Darwin's idea that life in its myriad forms evolved through a natural process of adaptation to changing conditions.

Darwin-bashers in America suffered a body-blow in December 2005, when a judge—striking down the policies of a district school board in Pennsylvania—delivered a 139-page verdict that delved deeply into questions about the origin of life and tore apart the case made by the “intelligent design” camp: the idea that some features of the natural world can be explained only by the direct intervention of a ingenious creator.

Intelligent design, the judge found, was a religious theory, not a scientific one—and its teaching in schools violated the constitution, which bars the establishment of any religion. One point advanced in favour of intelligent design—the “irreducible complexity” of some living things—was purportedly scientific, but it was not well-founded, the judge ruled. Proponents of intelligent design were also dishonest in saying that where there were gaps in evolutionary theory, their own view was the only alternative, according to the judge.

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which has spearheaded the American campaign to counter-balance the teaching of evolution, artfully distanced itself from the Pennsylvania case, saying the local school board had gone too far in mixing intelligent design with a more overtly religious doctrine of “creationism”. But the verdict made it much harder for school boards in other parts of America to mandate curbs on the teaching of evolution, as many have tried to do—to the horror of most professional scientists.

Whatever the defeats they have suffered on home ground, American foes of Darwin seem to be gaining influence elsewhere. In February several luminaries of the anti-evolution movement in the United States went to Istanbul for a grand conference where Darwin's ideas were roundly denounced. The organiser of the gathering was a Turkish Muslim author and columnist, Mustafa Akyol, who forged strong American connections during a fellowship at the Discovery Institute.

To the dismay of some Americans and the delight of others, Mr Akyol was invited to give evidence (against Darwin's ideas) at hearings held by the Kansas school board in 2005 on how science should be taught. Mr Akyol, an advocate of reconciliation between Muslims and the West who is much in demand at conferences on the future of Islam, is careful to distinguish his position from that of the extravagant publishing venture in his home city. “They make some valid criticisms of Darwinism, but I disagree with most of their other views,” insists the young author, whose other favourite cause is the compatibility between Islam and Western liberal ideals, including human rights and capitalism. But a multi-layered anti-Darwin movement has certainly brought about a climate in Turkey and other Muslim countries that makes sure challenges to evolution theory, be they sophisticated or crude, are often well received.

America's arguments over evolution are also being followed closely in Brazil, where—as the pope will find when he visits the country next month—various forms of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are advancing rapidly at the expense of the majority Catholic faith. Samuel Rodovalho, an activist in Brazil's Pentecostal church, puts it simply: “We are convinced that the story of Genesis is right, and we take heart from the fact that in North America the teaching of evolution in schools has been challenged.”

Even in the United States, defenders of evolution teaching do not see their battle as won. There was widespread dismay in their ranks in February when John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate, accepted an invitation (albeit to talk about geopolitics, not science) from the Discovery Institute. And some opponents of intelligent design are still recovering from their shock at reading in the New York Times a commentary written, partly at the prompting of the Discovery Institute, by the pope's close friend, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Archbishop of Vienna.

In his July 2005 article the cardinal seemed to challenge what most scientists would see as axiomatic—the idea that natural selection is an adequate explanation for the diversity and complexity of life in all its forms. Within days, the pope and his advisers found they had new interlocutors. Lawrence Krauss, an American physicist in the front-line of courtroom battles over education, fired off a letter to the Vatican urging a clarification. An agnostic Jew who insists that evolution neither disproves nor affirms any particular faith, Mr Krauss recruited as co-signatories two American biologists who were also devout Catholics. Around the same time, another Catholic voice was raised in support of evolution, that of Father George Coyne, a Jesuit astronomer who until last year was head of the Vatican observatory in Rome. Mr Krauss reckons his missive helped to nudge the Catholic authorities into clarifying their view and insisting that they did still accept natural selection as a scientific theory.

But that was not the end of the story. Catholic physicists, biologists and astronomers (like Father Coyne) insisted that there was no reason to revise their view that intelligent design is bad science. And they expressed concern (as the Christian philosopher Augustine did in the 4th century) that if the Christian church teaches things about the physical world which are manifestly false, then everything else the church teaches might be discredited too. But there is also a feeling among Pope Benedict's senior advisers that in rejecting intelligent design as it is understood in America they must not go too far in endorsing the idea that Darwinian evolution says all that needs to be, or can be, said about how the world came to be.

The net result has been the emergence of two distinct camps among the Catholic pundits who aspire to influence the pope. In one there are people such as Father Coyne, who believe (like the agnostic Mr Krauss) that physics and metaphysics can and should be separated. From his new base at a parish in North Carolina, Father Coyne insists strongly on the integrity of science—“natural phenomena have natural causes”—and he is as firm as any secular biologist in asserting that every year the theory of evolution is consolidated with fresh evidence.

In the second camp are those, including some high up in the Vatican bureaucracy, who feel that Catholic scientists like Father Coyne have gone too far in accepting the world-view of their secular colleagues. This camp stresses that Darwinian science should not seduce people into believing that man evolved purely as the result of a process of random selection. While rejecting American-style intelligent design, some authoritative Catholic thinkers claim to see God's hand in “convergence”: the apparent fact that, as they put it, similar processes and structures are present in organisms that have evolved separately.

As an example of Catholic thinking that is relatively critical of science-based views of the world, take Father Joseph Fessio, the provost of Ave Maria University in Florida and a participant in a seminar on creation and evolution which led to the new book with papal input. As Father Fessio observes, Catholics accept three different ways of learning about reality: empirical observation, direct revelations from God and, between those two categories, “natural philosophy”—the ability of human reason to discern divine reason in the created universe. That is not quite intelligent design, but it does sound similar. The mainly Protestant heritage of the United States may be one reason why the idea of “natural philosophy” is poorly understood by American thinkers, Father Fessio playfully suggests. (Another problem the Vatican may face is that Orthodox Christian theologians, as well as Catholic mystics, are wary of “natural philosophy”: they insist that mystical communion with God is radically different from observation or speculation by the human brain.)

The evolution of the anti-evolutionists

Whatever they think about science, there is one crucial problem that all Christian thinkers about creation must wrestle with: the status of the human being in relation to other creatures, and the whole universe. There is no reading of Christianity which does not assert the belief that mankind, while part of the animal kingdom, has a unique vocation and potential to enhance the rest of creation, or else to destroy it. This point has been especially emphasised by Pope Benedict's interlocutors in the Orthodox church, such as its senior prelate Patriarch Bartholomew I, who has been nudging the Vatican to take a stronger line on man's effect on the environment and climate change.

For Father Coyne, belief in man's unique status is entirely consistent with an evolutionary view of life. “The fact we are at the end of this marvellous process is something that glorifies us,” he says.

But Benedict XVI apparently wants to lay down an even stronger line on the status of man as a species produced by divine ordinance, not just random selection. “Man is the only creature on earth that God willed for his own sake,” says a document issued under Pope John Paul II and approved by the then Cardinal Ratzinger.

What is not quite clear is whether the current pope accepts the “Chinese wall” that his old scientific adviser, Father Coyne, has struggled to preserve between physics and metaphysics. It is in the name of this Chinese wall that Father Coyne and other Catholic scientists have been able to make common cause with agnostics, like Mr Krauss, in defence of the scientific method. What the Jesuit astronomer and his secular friends all share is the belief that people who agree about physics can differ about metaphysics or religion.

Critics like Father Fessio would retort that their problem was not with the Chinese wall—but with an attempt to tear it down by scientists whose position is both Darwinist and anti-religious: in other words, with those who believe that scientific observation of the universe leaves no room at all for religious belief. (Some scientists and philosophers go further, dismissing religion itself as a phenomenon brought about by man's evolutionary needs.)

The new book quoting Pope Benedict's contributions to last year's seminar shows him doing his best to pick his way through these arguments: accepting that scientific descriptions of the universe are valid as far as they go, while insisting that they are ultimately incomplete as a way of explaining how things came to be. On those points, he seems to share the “anti-Darwinist” position of Father Fessio; but he also agrees with Father Coyne that a “God of the gaps” theory—which uses a deity to fill in the real or imagined holes in evolutionary science—is too small-minded. Only a handful of the world's 2 billion Christians will be able to make sense of his intricate intellectual arguments, and there is a risk that simplistic reporting and faulty interpretation of his ideas could create the impression that the pope has deserted to the ranks of the outright anti-evolutionists; he has done no such thing, his advisers insist.

Not that the advocates of intelligent design or outright creationists are in need of anyone's endorsement. Their ideas are flourishing and their numbers growing. As Mr Krauss has caustically argued, the anti-evolution movement is itself a prime example of evolution and adaptability—defeated in one arena, it will resurface elsewhere. His ally Father Coyne, the devoted star-gazer, is one of the relatively few boffins who have managed to expound with equal passion both their scientific views and their religious beliefs. He writes with breathless excitement about “the dance of the fertile universe, a ballet with three ballerinas: chance, necessity and fertility.” Whether they are atheists or theists, other supporters of Darwin's ideas on natural selection will have to inspire as well as inform if they are to compete with their growing army of foes.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

166)Out of about 200 planets discovered so far outside our solar system, this one seems to be most earth-like.

Earth-like planet discovered outside solar system

ANNE MCILROY
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
April 24, 2007 at 5:53 PM EST

A team of European astronomers has found a planet outside our solar system that is the most Earth-like ever discovered. Those who spotted it say it could be covered in water, a necessary ingredient for life.

The planet, detected using a telescope in Chile, has a mass about five times that of the Earth. It is 14 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the sun. But that star — Gliese 581 — is what is known as a red dwarf, and is smaller, colder and 50 times fainter than our sun.

This means the planet appears to lie in what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone — not too hot, not too cold for life that depends on water, rather than ice. A number of teams, including one in Canada, have been hunting for a planet that is capable of sustaining life, one that would change our view of the universe and mean that we are not alone.

The European team announced yesterday that they have found the best contender to date.

"We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between zero and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid," says Stéphane Udry, the Geneva-based astronomer who is the lead author of a paper to be published as a letter to the editor in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth's radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky — like our Earth — or covered in oceans."

Gliese 581 is among the 100 closest stars to Earth, 20.5 light years away in the constellation Libra.

"Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target for future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life," says Xavier Delfosse, a member of the team that made the discovery and an astronomer at University of Grenoble in France.

"On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."
But that X lies well beyond reach of any current spaceship or unmanned probe, says Chris McCarthy, an astronomer at San Francisco State University.

"Let's just says it would take thousands of years to get there using current technology."
Jason Wright, at the University of California Berkeley, is another expert in exoplanets, or planets that orbit a star other than the sun.

He says it may be possible to find out more about this newly discovered planet using space-based telescopes.

"The closer a star is the easier it is to use a telescope to study its planets."

This isn't the first planet to be detected orbiting Gliese 581. Two years ago astronomers using the same 3.6-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile found a much bigger planet. It was more the size of Neptune, with a mass 15 times that of the Earth.

This new planet is the smallest planet outside our solar system found up until now, the European astronomers say. It completes its orbit in 13 days.

They say they have also found signs of a third planet, one with a mass about eight times that of the Earth and an orbit that takes 84 days.

There are a number of different techniques to find planets orbiting other stars, and so far roughly 200 have been detected.

The European team looked for a star that was wobbling because of the gravitational pull exerted by an unseen planet. You can measure the size of the planet from the size of the wobble, Dr. McCarthy says.

He is one of the growing number of researchers looking for new planets, and potential worlds like our own, using both ground-based and space-based telescopes.

He says yesterday's announcement is big news.

But he cautions that more work needs to be done.

"It is still unclear what kind of planet this could be. It could be gaseous. It could be rocky. But the less massive it is the more likely it is to be rocky and thus similar to Earth.''

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

165)The roiling, rumbling, dynamic Sun seen in three dimensions.

NASA has released remarkable pictures of our Sun(as seen in three dimensions) on its website as well as on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070424.html

I posted some fascinating pictures of the sun taken by different types of telescopes earlier on my blogsite and re-post those pictures here:

http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/signsayats-in-universe-astronomy_2172.html

The Sun is a star not to be taken for granted by us as it is the primary driver of life on earth.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

164)Orbiting much closer to a smaller, "colder" sun, this planet outside our solar system may be habitable and harbour life.

Astronomers may have found the first Earth 2

By Margaret Munro

CanWest News Service
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Astronomers have spotted “the first habitable Earth-like planet” outside the solar system, a find so enticing that Canada’s space telescope is being redirected to take a closer look.

The “super-Earth” appears to be 50 per cent larger than Earth and orbiting around a star in a “habitable zone” where temperatures are so balmy that water — the elixir of life — would be liquid.

“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” says Stephane Udry, of the Geneva Observatory, who leads the European team that reported the discovery Tuesday in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The planet, believed to be either rocky like Earth or covered with oceans, is seen as a promising target in the search for extraterrestrial life.

“On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X,” says team member Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University.

Since the discovery in 1995 of the first “exoplanet” orbiting a star other than the sun, more than 200 planets have been found. Most are gas giants on extreme orbits around stars that make them either scorching hot or far too cold to maintain life as we know it.

The Europeans say the new planet is the smallest exoplanet and “most Earth-like” so far. They have deduced that it orbits its star in 13 days and is 14 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the sun.

The scientists found the planet using a super-sensitive planet-hunting machine fitted onto a European telescope in Chile. It detects the tiny changes — or wobbles — produced as planets orbit around stars. The planet’s host star, a red dwarf called Gliese 581, is much smaller and colder than the sun, which means the planet can be close to its star but still be in the so-called “habitable zone,” the region around a star where water would be liquid.

Gliese 581 is among the 100 closest stars to Earth, located 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra. This means light takes 20.5 years to travel from Gliese 581 to Earth.

Canadian astronomer Jaymie Matthews of the University of British Columbia cautions there is no evidence so far showing the planet actually harbours water, let alone “extras from Star Trek.” All scientists can say for certain is that the planet appears to exist, and could have a solid surface and habitable temperatures.

But the European evidence is so exciting, Mr. Matthews says, that he and his colleagues have agreed to focus Canada’s suitcase-sized space telescope, known as MOST, on the alien solar system.

“We’re putting it on a stakeout,” says Mr. Matthews, who leads the MOST team and is currently in Vienna. (MOST stands for microvariabilty and oscillations of stars.)

He expects to have the planetary system in the microsatellite telescope’s sights by late next week. “We’ve been working on this for a few weeks,” he said in a phone interview.

Mr. Matthews says it will be possible to look for the “super-Earth” without too big an impact on other MOST projects.

“We’ll be squeezing it into to our regularly scheduled programming. That’s the beauty of having something like MOST. It’s almost like having your own private space telescope in the sense that it’s possible for us to take advantage of these targets of opportunity and adapt very, very quickly.”

With luck, Mr. Matthews says MOST, which has a much clearer view from its orbit above Earth, will be able to actually see the planet orbiting across the face of the star and confirm its existence.

The odds that MOST will be in the right vantage point to observe such a “transit” is about one in 20.“It’s a long shot,” he says, but well worth taking because the results could be huge.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

163)"If music be the food of love, play on...." "If music be the Food of Love, play on..."

I was having lunch at my mother's place recently and she was playing a most pleasant ginan tape(as she usually does) and my brothers and I revelled in the melodious singing coupled with tunes that put us into a pleasant post-lunch meditative stupor. It must have been this frame of mind that caused me to post such a voluminous comment on the Ismaili Mail website in response to what I thought was an excellent 'you tube' video introduction to what looked like the beginning of a ginanfest at Canada's Darkhana Jamat Khana(Burnaby, Vancouver).

The creator and presenter of this video clip(Aleem Karmali) caught my serious attention because he talked about the beneficial effects that music of every culture can have on societies as well as individuals. Ginans as a musical tradition, but one with a difference in that it prosletyses the thoughts and guidance of some of the most divinely-inspired individuals the world has ever produced, are very much a part of the world-wide musical tradition. I spoke also of the tradition of western music and rhythms that have both in the past and now had such a great influence on my life but I forgot to mention a few in my comment(see below): who can forget the Motown sound of the great Marvin Gaye, Smoky Robinson, Stevie Wonder, the Temptations or the Four Tops, among many others; or the gyrating disco beats and songs of Donna Summer, Barry White, Gloria Gaynor, Earth, Wind and Fire, again among many others. In the instrumental section, in addition to the fusion of the Latin American and Persian guitar rhythms of Costa Rican George Strunz and Iranian Ardeshir Farah, we have Jesse Cook, Ottmar Liebert and our very own Torontonian Robert Michaels , again among many others. This was the posting and comment on Ismaili Mail:

http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/history-of-ginans/#comment-5379

Our Imams have referred to ginans as a "wonderful tradition" and I certainly hold in reverence anyone who is knowledgeable on this subject and takes the time to share their knowledge with the rest of us.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

Thursday, April 19, 2007

162)Personal musings and the facts about Abu Ali Ibn Sina.

The Heritage F.I.E.L.D. Ismaili Net website, an extremely extensive website, had this information on its main page today about a remarkable figure in Islamic and Ismaili history, Abu Ali Sina(aka Avicenna to his followers in Europe):

http://www.ismaili.net/html/index.php (the April 19th 2007 main page)

The above site also links to two other sites to give a detailed accounting of Ibn Sina's contributions to Islamic Philosophy, Medicine, Cosmology and other fields:

http://www.ismaili.net/hero/h0005.html

http://www.ismaili.net/hero/hero14.html

The Institute of Ismaili Studies also put up some information on Ibn Sina and other intellectuals from Ismailism's past:

http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=106512

My link to the F.I.E.L.D. Heritage Ismaili Net website is historic and momentous and I appreciate very much that they allow me to cross post whatever I write on my personal blog onto the Doctrines section of their extensive and comprehensive website. My desire to start a personal blog was inspired by the Wednesday, June 8th 2005 farman made by Mowlana Hazar Imam in Toronto, Ontario, Canada(morning session), in which he uttered these pearls of wisdom:

".....Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly...."(see blogpost no. 19).

I began my blog on March 16th 2006 on the Heritage F.I.E.L.D. Ismaili Net website and started this Google blogger site in December 2006, archiving all my earlier posts onto the new Google site.

Ever since I began my post-secondary studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in September 1973, I began to develop a keen interest in the natural world and the universe around us and in which we live, move and have our being. I tried to see if there could be a connection between the science I was learning and the religion I was born into. It was only after the Institute of Ismaili Studies was well established and started putting out top rated publications that I was able to read some of their material and make the clear connection between science(what is the universe made up of?, how does it operate?) and Ismaili Islam. It turned out to be an epiphany for me which occured in the Medical Science library of McMaster University, a place which has now become a shrine of intellectual pilgrimage for me. I was later sidetracked for 20 years by a career in family medicine but, as fate would have it, I was able to return to my first love 5 years ago, for which I am deeply grateful to the " Soul that sustains, embraces and is the Universe"(Aga Khan III).

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

161)Learning more geometry from the Maker of the Universe and seeing the 'signs' they may symbolize.

There is a plethora of shapes that make up the many structures in space and a good many of these shapes are found in natural objects and phenomena on earth as well:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030925.html:

The spiral shape of the above galaxy resembles the shape of Hurricane Isabella as well as spiral shapes inside nautilus shells, sunflower seeds and cauliflower.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap041229.html:

The helical shape of this nebula resembles that of the DNA master molecule inside the nuclei of cells of living organisms as well as the helical shapes of many proteins, the workhorses of living cells. Some may argue that the helix as a series of linked circles moving forward in one direction can also symbolise the cycles of Prophethood and Imamat that characterise the Ismaili Muslim interpretation of the cosmological paradigm as it pertains to the manifestation of transcendence in creation.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070416.html:

This square-shaped galaxy also has many counterpart square-shaped objects in other parts of the universe.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070403.html:

This hexagonal cloud system over the north pole of Saturn again resembles other hexagonal shapes in the cosmos and here on earth, eg, some types of snowflakes. I blogged about this shape and hinted that well-known esotericists in the Ismaili Muslim tradition might attribute a deeper spiritual significance(relating to the eras of the six great speaking prophets or Natiqs) to this shape on top of one of planet earth's elder sister planets. I blogged about it here:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/04/151learning-geometry-from-maker-of.html

It has long been inferred that Mathematics shapes and governs the laws around which the cosmos operates. Some humans have skillfully mimicked these mathematical laws in their own creations of structures on earth over the millennia. I blogged about some examples here:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/144harmonious-mathematical-reasoning.html

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

Monday, April 16, 2007

160)Miscellaneous scientific information about the world and universe in which we live, move and have our being.

From the back page of the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, Mon April 16th 2007.

SOCIAL STUDIES

A DAILY MISCELLANY OF INFORMATION BY MICHAEL KESTERTON

The drifting pole

"The north magnetic pole is no longer a resident of Canada. It has drifted across the Canadian Arctic and is now angling toward Siberia," reports Canadian Geographic magazine. "Over the past century, the pole migrated an average of about 10 kilometres per year, says Larry Newitt, head of the Geomagnetic Laboratory at Natural Resource Canada in Ottawa. Since the 1970s, this speed has increased to about 50 kilometres per year. . . . If the north magnetic pole continues at its current rate, it could reach Siberia by 2056."

Boo to lawns?

"We sunbathe, picnic, and play sports on them," says Dwell magazine. "Our bare feet seem inexorably drawn to them. And for many of us, they're the first thing we see when we step out the front door: lawns. It's no surprise they cover 40 million acres (16 million hectares) in the U.S., or that we spend more caring for them than the entire GDP of Costa Rica. Yet despite their attendant pleasures, these patches of viridian splendor leave much to be desired. Sucking up close to 240 gallons of water per person each day of the growing season, our beloved lawns are gradually depleting our natural water sources."

Viva dirt

"Forget the spring cleaning," writes John Elliott in The Sunday Times of London. "A study has found evidence that bacteria common in soil and dirt could improve people's spirits. According to the research, the action of Mycobacterium vaccae (M vaccae) on the brain is similar to that of some commonly used antidepressants. The bacterium, which is related to the microbe that causes tuberculosis, appears to work by stimulating the body's immune system. This, in turn, prompts certain cells in the brain to produce more serotonin, a hormone associated with feelings of well-being. 'These studies help us to understand how the body communicates with the brain and why a healthy immune system is important for maintaining mental health,' said Dr. Chris Lowry, a neuroscientist at Bristol University who carried out the research. 'They also leave us wondering if we shouldn't all spend more time playing in the dirt.' "

Passing for human

"He recognizes himself in the mirror, plays hide-and-seek and breaks into fits of giggles when tickled," writes Kate Connolly in The London Observer. "He is also our closest evolutionary cousin. A group of world-leading primatologists argue that this is proof enough that Hiasl, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, deserves to be treated like a human. In a test case in Austria, campaigners are seeking to ditch the 'species barrier' and have taken Hiasl's case to court. If Hiasl is granted human status -- and the rights that go with it -- it will signal a victory for other primate species and unleash a wave of similar cases."

Green flower pots

Gardeners are famous for recycling, writes Virginia Smith in The Philadelphia Inquirer. "But there's one thing that every gardener buys that routinely gets tossed in the trash and buried in a landfill: the plastic flower pots used to grow seedlings. They're everywhere, especially at this time of year. They don't decompose . . .What's a conscientious gardener to do? The answer may lie in some surprising places: in chicken feathers and cow manure and, to a lesser extent, corn, soybeans and rice. Scientists and farmers are investigating whether these substances can be moulded into biodegradable pots to replace the plastic variety, which constitutes a $500-million (U.S.) industry in North America."

A trick of the light

"In 1999, Lene Hau and her colleagues at Harvard University slowed light traveling at 186,282 miles a second to bicycle speed (38 miles an hour)," writes J.R. Minkel in Scientific American. "A few years later the team stopped a beam of light completely. This year, Hau's team added another quantum trick: turning light into matter and then back into light again. The matter was a pair of ultra-cold atomic gases called Bose-Einstein condensates."

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

Sunday, April 15, 2007

159)"...through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation."

Einstein was right: space and time bend

Ninety years after he expounded his famous theory, a $700m Nasa probe has proved that the universe behaves as he said. Now the race is on to show that the other half of relativity also works.

Anushka Asthana and David Smith
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The Observer

Under his name in the Oxford English Dictionary is the simple definition: genius. Yet for decades physicists have been asking the question: did Albert Einstein get it wrong? After half a century, seven cancellations and $700m, a mission to test his theory about the universe has finally confirmed that the man was a mastermind - or at least half proved it.

The early results from Gravity Probe B, one of Nasa's most complicated satellites, confirmed yesterday 'to a precision of better than 1 per cent' the assertion Einstein made 90 years ago - that an object such as the Earth does indeed distort the fabric of space and time.

But this - what is referred to as the 'geodetic' effect - is only half of the theory. The other, 'frame-dragging', stated that as the world spins it drags the fabric of the universe behind it.
Francis Everitt, the Stanford University professor who has devoted his life to investigating Einstein's theory of relativity, told scientists at the American Physical Society it would be another eight months before he could measure the 'frame-dragging' effect precisely.

'Understanding the details is a bit like an archeological dig,' said William Bencze, programme manager for the mission. 'A scientist starts with a bulldozer, follows with a shovel, then finally uses dental picks and toothbrushes to clear the dust away. We're passing out the toothbrushes now.'

The Gravity Probe B project was conceived in the late 1950s but suffered decades of delays while other scientists ran tests corroborating Einstein's theory. It was Everitt's determination that stopped it being cancelled. The joint mission between Nasa and Stanford University uses four of the most perfect spheres - ultra precise gyroscopes - to detect minute distortions in the fabric of the universe. Everitt's aim was to prove to the highest precision yet if Einstein was correct in the way he described gravity.

According to Einstein, in the same way that a large ball placed on a elasticated cloth stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time. A marble moving along the sagging cloth will be drawn towards the ball, as the Earth is to the Sun, but not fall into it as long as it keeps moving at speed. Gravity, argued Einstein, was not an attractive force between bodies as had been previously thought.

Few scientists need the final results, which will be revealed in December, to convince them of Einstein's genius. 'From the most esoteric aspects of time dilation through to the beautiful and simple equation, e=mc2, the vast bulk of Einstein's ideas about the universe are standing up to the test of time,' said Robert Massey, from the Royal Astronomical Society.

He said the mission was 'legitimate science' to test a theory and confirm its brilliance, but others have criticised the costs and length of the study, claiming that what was announced had already been shown. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, said the announcement would 'fork no lightning'.

The theory explained

When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity in 1915, he found a new way to describe gravity. It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had supposed, but a consequence of the distortion of space and time, conceived together in his theory as 'space-time'. Any object distorts the fabric of space-time and the bigger it is, the greater the effect.

Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the 'geodetic effect'. A marble moving along the trampoline will be drawn inexorably towards the ball.

Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is because of the speed at which they are travelling.

According to the theory, matter and energy distort space-time, curving it around themselves. 'Frame dragging' theoretically occurs when the rotation of a large body 'twists' nearby space and time. It is this second part of Einstein's theory that the Nasa mission has yet to corroborate.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

158)20 things you need to know about Albert Einstein, the smartest scientist of the 20th century.

From TIME magazine, Thursday, April 5th 2007:

1)Was Einstein a slow learner as a child?

Einstein was slow in learning how to speak. His parents even consulted a doctor. He also had a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one headmaster to expel him and another to amuse history by saying that he would never amount to much. But these traits helped make him a genius. His cocky contempt for authority led him to question conventional wisdom. His slow verbal development made him curious about ordinary things – such as space and time – that most adults take for granted. His father gave him a compass at age five, and he puzzled over the nature of a magnetic field for the rest of his life. And he tended to think in pictures rather than words.

2)Was Einstein learning disabled?

Some researchers claim to detect in Einstein’s childhood a mild manifestation of autism or Asperger’s syndrome. Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the autism research center at Cambridge University, is among those. He writes that autism is associated with a “particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize.” He also notes that this pattern “explains the ‘islets of ability’ that people with autism display in subjects like math or music or drawing -- all skills that benefit from systemizing.”* I do not find such a long-distance diagnosis to be convincing. Even as a teenager, Einstein made close friends, had passionate relationships, enjoyed collegial discussions, communicated well verbally and could empathize with friends and humanity in general.

3)Did Einstein flunk math?

One widely held belief about Einstein is that he failed math as a student, an assertion that is made, often accompanied by the phrase “as everyone knows,” by scores of books and thousands of websites designed to reassure underachieving students. A Google search of Einstein failed math turns up more than 500,000 references. The allegation even made it into the famous “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” newspaper column. Alas, Einstein’s childhood offers history many savory ironies, but this is not one of them. In 1935, a rabbi in Princeton showed him a clipping of the Ripley’s column with the headline “Greatest living mathematician failed in mathematics.” Einstein laughed. “I never failed in mathematics,” he replied, correctly. “Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” In primary school, he was at the top of his class and “far above the school requirements” in math. By age 12, his sister recalled, “he already had a predilection for solving complicated problems in applied arithmetic,” and he decided to see if he could jump ahead by learning geometry and algebra on his own. His parents bought him the textbooks in advance so that he could master them over summer vacation. Not only did he learn the proofs in the books, he also tackled the new theories by trying to prove them on his own. He even came up on his own with a way to prove the Pythagorean theory.

4)Did Einstein think in pictures rather than words?

Yes, his great breakthroughs came from visual experiments performed in his head rather than the lab. They were called Gedankenexperiment -- thought experiments. At age 16, he tried to picture in his mind what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. If you reached the speed of light, wouldn’t the light waves seem stationery to you? But Maxwell’s famous equations describing electromagnetic waves didn’t allow that. He knew that math was the language nature uses to describe her wonders, so he could visualize how equations were reflected in realities. So for the next ten years he wrestled with this thought experiment until he came up with the special theory of relativity.

5)What thought picture did Einstein use for special relativity?

Among other things, he pictured lightning striking at both ends of a moving train. A person on the embankment might see the strikes as simultaneous, but to someone on the speeding train they would appear to have happened at different moments. Because the train is speeding forward, the light from the strike at the front of the train would reach him a moment before the light from the strike at the back of the train. From that he realized that simultaneity is relative to your state of motion, and from that he came up with the idea that there is no such thing as absolute time. Time is relative. Hence the special theory of relativity.

6)What was the thought experiment that led Einstein to general relativity?

He imagined a man in free fall. To understand what he saw, imagine a man in a closed elevator chamber that is falling toward the earth. He would float feely in the chamber, and anything he pulled from his pocket and dropped would float freely next to him – just as if he were in a closed chamber sitting still in a gravity-free region of deep outer space. On the other hand, imagine a woman in a closed chamber who is accelerating upward in outer space, far from any gravity. She would feel pulled down to the floor, just as if she were being pulled down by gravity. From the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, he constructed his general theory of relativity.

7)Is there a thought-picture that describes his conclusions about general relativity?

Gravity, he figured, was a warping of space and time. It can be described by using another thought experiment. Picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline. It curves the fabric as it moves. Then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction (as Newton’s theory had it), but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric. Now imagine this happening in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time. O.K., it’s not easy, but that’s why we’re no Einstein and he was. He was able to come up with a gravitational field equation that showed how matter curved space and how curved space told matter how to move.

8)What was Einstein’s miracle year?

In 1905, Einstein had graduated from college but had not been able to get a doctoral dissertation accepted or get an academic job. So he was toiling six days a week as a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office. During his spare time, he produced four papers that upended physics. The first showed that light could be conceived as particles as well as waves. The second proved the existence of atoms and molecules. The third, the special theory of relativity, said that there was no such thing as absolute time or space. And the fourth noted an equivalence between energy and mass described by the most famous equation in all of physics, E=mc2.

9)What was Einstein’s personal life like at the time?

Helping him check his math was a moody Serbian, Mileva Mari, who had been the only woman in his physics class at college. They had fallen passionately in love and had an illegitimate daughter, which he allowed to be given up for adoption before he ever saw her. They then got married and had two boys. Eventually their relationship disintegrated, and Einstein sought a divorce. He offered her a deal: One of those 1905 papers, he presumed, would eventually win the Nobel Prize, and if she gave him a divorce he would give her the prize money. She thought for a week and accepted. Because Einstein’s theories were so radical, it took until 1922 before he was awarded the prize and she could collect.

10)Does Mileva Mari deserve credit as a true collaborator?

Well, she helped with the math. And she put up with him, which was even harder. But a careful analysis of all their letters and later statements shows that the concepts involved were all his. This should not diminish, however, the respect she is due for overcoming most (but not all) of fthe obstacles facing a woman who wanted at that time to be a physicist.

11)How was relativity received?

Scientists were unsure at first whether the general theory was right. But Einstein proposed a dramatic experiment. At the next appropriate eclipse, in 1919, scientists could measure how starlight passing close to the sun was bent by its gravity. The six-deck headline in the New York Times read: “Lights All Askew in the Heavens / Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations / Einstein Theory Triumphs.” That was back when folks knew how to write great headlines. Einstein’s launch into fame contributed to the birth of a new celebrity age. He became a scientific supernova and humanist icon, one of the most famous faces on the planet. The public earnestly puzzled over his theories, elevated him into a cult of genius, and canonized him as a secular saint.

12)Why did it take so long for Einstein to get a Nobel Prize?

Initially his 1905 papers were considered baffling and unproven. He was first nominated for the prize in 1910 by the chemistry laureate Wilhelm Ostwald, who had rejected Einstein’s pleas for a job nine years earlier. Ostwald cited special relativity, but the Swedish committee was mindful of the charge in Alfred Nobel’s will that the prize should go to “the most important discovery or invention,” and it felt that relativity theory was not exactly either of those.

The dramatic announcement in November 1919 that the eclipse observations had confirmed parts of Einstein’s theory should have made 1920 his year. But politics intervened. Up until then, the primary justifications for denying Einstein a Nobel had been scientific: his work was purely theoretical, and it putatively did not involve the “discovery” of any new laws. After the eclipse observations, the arguments against Einstein were tinged with more cultural and personal bias, including anti-Semitism. To his critics, the fact that he had suddenly achieved superstar status was evidence of his self-promotion rather than his worthiness of a Nobel. So the 1920 prize instead went to a scientist who was Einstein’s scientific opposite: Charles-Edouard Guillaume, who had made his modest mark on science by assuring that standard measures were more precise and discovering metal alloys that had practical uses, including making good measuring rods.

By 1921, the public’s Einstein mania was in full force, and there was a groundswell of support for him to win the Nobel – indeed, an expressed sense that it would be inexplicable if he didn’t. But the committee was still not ready. The great impasse threatened to become embarrassing. To the rescue rode a theoretical physicist from the University of Uppsala, Carl Wilhelm Oseen, who joined the committee in 1922. He realized that the whole issue of relativity theory was so encrusted with controversy that it would be better to try a different tack. So Oseen pushed hard to give the prize to Einstein for “the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Each part of that phrase was carefully calculated. It was not a nomination for relativity, of course. In fact, despite the way it has been phrased by some historians, it was not for Einstein’s theory of light quanta, even though that was the primary focus of the relevant 1905 paper. Nor was it for any theory at all. Instead, it was for the discovery of a law.

Thus it was that Einstein became the recipient of the 1921 Nobel Prize, in the words of the official citation, “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Einstein would not, as it turned out, ever win a Nobel for his work on relativity and gravitation, nor for anything other than the photoelectric effect.

13)What cultural impact did Einstein’s theories have?

For nearly three centuries, the mechanical universe of Isaac Newton, based on absolute certainties and laws, had formed the psychological foundation of the Enlightenment and the social order, with a belief in causes and effects, order, even duty. Now came a view of the universe in which space and time were dependent on frames of reference. This apparent dismissal of certainties seemed heretical, perhaps even godless. Indirectly, relativity became associated with a new relativism in morality and art and politics. There was less faith in absolutes, not only of time and space, but also of truth and morality. Imaginative nonconformity was in the air: Picasso, Joyce, Freud, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and others were breaking conventional bonds. Infused into this stew was a conception of the universe in which space and time and the properties of particles seemed based on the vagaries of observations.

14)Was Einstein a moral relativist?

Einstein was interpreted as a relativist by many (including some whose disdain fueled their anti-Semitism.) This was not the case. Beneath all of Einstein’s theories, including relativity, was a quest for certainties and absolutes. In fact, he considered calling his masterwork “Invariance Theory” rather than “Relativity Theory,” because it was based on underlying invariances and certainties. His objection to quantum mechanics was that it assumed that the realities of the universe depended on our observation of it, which conflicted with his own faith that there was a reality that existed independent of our ability to observe it.

15)What role did Einstein’s Jewish identity play in his life and achievements?

His affiliation with the Jewish people was the strongest bond in his life, even though he did not adhere to the rituals of the religion. There was an anti-Semitic reaction both to the publicity he got and to the abstract and seemingly heretical nature of relativity theory. But the rise in anti-Semitism made him identify with the Jewish people even more. His first trip to America was to raise money for the Zionist movement, and in 1933 he fled Hitler and moved to Princeton. Near the end of his life, he was offered the presidency of Israel, which he politely declined.

16)Did Einstein believe in God?

Yes. He defined God in an impersonal, deistic fashion, but he deeply believed that God’s handiwork was reflected in the harmony of nature’s laws and the beauty of all that exists. He often invoked God, such as by saying He wouldn’t play dice, when rejecting quantum mechanics. Einstein’s belief in something larger than himself produced in him a wondrous mixture of confidence and humility. As he famously declared: “A spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”

When asked directly if he believed in God, he always insisted he did, and explained it once this way: “We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

17)Are Einstein’s theories still accepted?

Yes. Einstein’s tale encompasses the vast sweep of modern science, from the infinitesimal to the infinite -- from the smallest event imaginable, the emission of photons, to the largest conceivable event, expansion of the cosmos. A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in his universe. Photoelectric cells and television, nuclear power and lasers, space travel and even semiconductors all bear his fingerprints. He signed the letter to President Roosevelt suggesting a project to build an atom bomb, and the letters of his famed equation relating energy to mass hover in our minds when we picture the resulting mushroom cloud. The two great theories that in 1905 he ushered into the 20th century -- quantum theory and relativity -- are still twin pillars (although somewhat incompatible ones) of theoretical physics a century later.

18)Didn’t Einstein reject quantum mechanics?

He believed that quantum mechanics, which has probabilities and uncertainties at its foundation, did not give a complete description of the universe. He spent the second half of his career trying to poke holes in the theory and to subsume it in a unified theory that would restore certainty and determinism to physics. He was not successful, but his lonely and stubborn quest tells us a lot about his personality and mind.

19)What were Einstein’s politics?

He was a pacifist until Hitler came to power and caused him to revise his geopolitical equations. He urged the building of the atom bomb, but then became a leader in the movement to find ways to control it. Just as he sought a unified theory in science, he sought a world federalism that would impose order on competing nations. His belief in the value of free thought and speech, and his merry willingness to defy authority, caused him to be an adamant opponent of McCarthyism.

20)With his resistance to McCarthyism and quantum uncertainty, was Einstein disillusioned at the end?

Einstein was not destined to die a bitter man. He came to understand America’s freedoms, and he was pleased that democracy tended to balance itself after such excesses as the McCarthy investigations. On his deathbed in 1955, he worked on a speech he was scheduled to give for Israeli independence day. “I speak to you today not as an American citizen and not as a Jew, but as a human being,” it began. He put it aside on that final night to pick up a notebook that was filled with scribbled calculations. To the very end, he struggled to find his elusive unified field theory. And the last thing he wrote, right before the pain overwhelmed him, was one more line of symbols and numbers that he hoped might get him, and the rest of us, just a little step closer to the spirit manifest in the laws of the universe.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

157)Albert Einstein and Faith.

TIME magazine, Thursday, April 5th 2007:

He was slow in learning how to talk. "My parents were so worried," he later recalled, "that they consulted a doctor." Even after he had begun using words, sometime after the age of 2, he developed a quirk that prompted the family maid to dub him "der Depperte," the dopey one. Whenever he had something to say, he would try it out on himself, whispering it softly until it sounded good enough to pronounce aloud. "Every sentence he uttered," his worshipful younger sister recalled, "no matter how routine, he repeated to himself softly, moving his lips." It was all very worrying, she said. "He had such difficulty with language that those around him feared he would never learn."

His slow development was combined with a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one schoolmaster to send him packing and another to declare that he would never amount to much. These traits made Albert Einstein the patron saint of distracted schoolkids everywhere. But they also helped make him, or so he later surmised, the most creative scientific genius of modern times.

His cocky contempt for authority led him to question received wisdom in ways that well-trained acolytes in the academy never contemplated. And as for his slow verbal development, he thought that it allowed him to observe with wonder the everyday phenomena that others took for granted. Instead of puzzling over mysterious things, he puzzled over the commonplace. "When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance," Einstein once explained. "The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have."

It may seem logical, in retrospect, that a combination of awe and rebellion made Einstein exceptional as a scientist. But what is less well known is that those two traits also combined to shape his spiritual journey and determine the nature of his faith. The rebellion part comes in at the beginning of his life: he rejected at first his parents' secularism and later the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intercedes in the daily workings of the world. But the awe part comes in his 50s when he settled into a deism based on what he called the "spirit manifest in the laws of the universe" and a sincere belief in a "God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists."

Einstein was descended, on both parents' sides, from Jewish tradesmen and peddlers who had, for at least two centuries, made modest livings in the rural villages of Swabia in southwestern Germany. With each generation they had become increasingly assimilated into the German culture they loved--or so they thought. Although Jewish by cultural designation and kindred instinct, they had little interest in the religion itself.

In his later years, Einstein would tell an old joke about an agnostic uncle who was the only member of his family who went to synagogue. When asked why he did so, the uncle would respond, "Ah, but you never know." Einstein's parents, on the other hand, were "entirely irreligious." They did not keep kosher or attend synagogue, and his father Hermann referred to Jewish rituals as "ancient superstitions," according to a relative.

Consequently, when Albert turned 6 and had to go to school, his parents did not care that there was no Jewish one near their home. Instead he went to the large Catholic school in their neighborhood. As the only Jew among the 70 students in his class, he took the standard course in Catholic religion and ended up enjoying it immensely.

Despite his parents' secularism, or perhaps because of it, Einstein rather suddenly developed a passionate zeal for Judaism. "He was so fervent in his feelings that, on his own, he observed Jewish religious strictures in every detail," his sister recalled. He ate no pork, kept kosher and obeyed the strictures of the Sabbath. He even composed his own hymns, which he sang to himself as he walked home from school.

Einstein's greatest intellectual stimulation came from a poor student who dined with his family once a week. It was an old Jewish custom to take in a needy religious scholar to share the Sabbath meal; the Einsteins modified the tradition by hosting instead a medical student on Thursdays. His name was Max Talmud, and he began his weekly visits when he was 21 and Einstein was 10.

Talmud brought Einstein science books, including a popular illustrated series called People's Books on Natural Science, "a work which I read with breathless attention," said Einstein. The 21 volumes were written by Aaron Bernstein, who stressed the interrelations between biology and physics, and reported in great detail the experiments being done at the time, especially in Germany.

Talmud also helped Einstein explore the wonders of mathematics by giving him a textbook on geometry two years before he was scheduled to learn that subject in school. When Talmud arrived each Thursday, Einstein delighted in showing him the problems he had solved that week. Initially, Talmud was able to help him, but he was soon surpassed by his pupil. "After a short time, a few months, he had worked through the whole book," Talmud recalled. "Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow."

Einstein's exposure to science and math produced a sudden transformation at age 12, just as he would have been readying for a bar mitzvah. He suddenly gave up Judaism. That decision does not appear to have been drawn from Bernstein's books because the author made clear he saw no contradiction between science and religion. As he put it, "The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence."
Einstein would later come close to these sentiments. But at the time, his leap away from faith was a radical one. "Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of free thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression."

Einstein did, however, retain from his childhood religious phase a profound faith in, and reverence for, the harmony and beauty of what he called the mind of God as it was expressed in the creation of the universe and its laws. Around the time he turned 50, he began to articulate more clearly--in various essays, interviews and letters--his deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one. One particular evening in 1929, the year he turned 50, captures Einstein's middle-age deistic faith. He and his wife were at a dinner party in Berlin when a guest expressed a belief in astrology. Einstein ridiculed the notion as pure superstition. Another guest stepped in and similarly disparaged religion. Belief in God, he insisted, was likewise a superstition.

At this point the host tried to silence him by invoking the fact that even Einstein harbored religious beliefs. "It isn't possible!" the skeptical guest said, turning to Einstein to ask if he was, in fact, religious. "Yes, you can call it that," Einstein replied calmly. "Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious."

Shortly after his 50th birthday, Einstein also gave a remarkable interview in which he was more revealing than he had ever been about his religious sensibility. It was with George Sylvester Viereck, who had been born in Germany, moved to America as a child and then spent his life writing gaudily erotic poetry, interviewing great men and expressing his complex love for his fatherland. Einstein assumed Viereck was Jewish. In fact, Viereck proudly traced his lineage to the family of the Kaiser, and he would later become a Nazi sympathizer who was jailed in America during World War II for being a German propagandist.

Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. "It's possible to be both," replied Einstein. "Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind."

Should Jews try to assimilate? "We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform."

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? "As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene."

You accept the historical existence of Jesus? "Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."

Do you believe in God? "I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."

Is this a Jewish concept of God? "I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will. Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine. In that respect I am not a Jew."

Is this Spinoza's God? "I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but I admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things."

Do you believe in immortality? "No. And one life is enough for me."

Einstein tried to express these feelings clearly, both for himself and all of those who wanted a simple answer from him about his faith. So in the summer of 1930, amid his sailing and ruminations in Caputh, he composed a credo, "What I Believe," that he recorded for a human-rights group and later published. It concluded with an explanation of what he meant when he called himself religious: "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man."

People found the piece evocative, and it was reprinted repeatedly in a variety of translations. But not surprisingly, it did not satisfy those who wanted a simple answer to the question of whether or not he believed in God. "The outcome of this doubt and befogged speculation about time and space is a cloak beneath which hides the ghastly apparition of atheism," Boston's Cardinal William Henry O'Connell said. This public blast from a Cardinal prompted the noted Orthodox Jewish leader in New York, Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, to send a very direct telegram: "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words." Einstein used only about half his allotted number of words. It became the most famous version of an answer he gave often: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

Some religious Jews reacted by pointing out that Spinoza had been excommunicated from Amsterdam's Jewish community for holding these beliefs, and that he had also been condemned by the Catholic Church. "Cardinal O'Connell would have done well had he not attacked the Einstein theory," said one Bronx rabbi. "Einstein would have done better had he not proclaimed his nonbelief in a God who is concerned with fates and actions of individuals. Both have handed down dicta outside their jurisdiction."

But throughout his life, Einstein was consistent in rejecting the charge that he was an atheist. "There are people who say there is no God," he told a friend. "But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views." And unlike Sigmund Freud or Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw, Einstein never felt the urge to denigrate those who believed in God; instead, he tended to denigrate atheists. "What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos," he explained.

In fact, Einstein tended to be more critical of debunkers, who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful. "The fanatical atheists," he wrote in a letter, "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres."

Einstein later explained his view of the relationship between science and religion at a conference at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. The realm of science, he said, was to ascertain what was the case, but not evaluate human thoughts and actions about what should be the case. Religion had the reverse mandate. Yet the endeavors worked together at times. "Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding," he said. "This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion." The talk got front-page news coverage, and his pithy conclusion became famous. "The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

But there was one religious concept, Einstein went on to say, that science could not accept: a deity who could meddle at whim in the events of his creation. "The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God," he argued. Scientists aim to uncover the immutable laws that govern reality, and in doing so they must reject the notion that divine will, or for that matter human will, plays a role that would violate this cosmic causality.

His belief in causal determinism was incompatible with the concept of human free will. Jewish as well as Christian theologians have generally believed that people are responsible for their actions. They are even free to choose, as happens in the Bible, to disobey God's commandments, despite the fact that this seems to conflict with a belief that God is all knowing and all powerful.
Einstein, on the other hand, believed--as did Spinoza--that a person's actions were just as determined as that of a billiard ball, planet or star. "Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions," Einstein declared in a statement to a Spinoza Society in 1932. It was a concept he drew also from his reading of Schopenhauer. "Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity," he wrote in his famous credo. "Schopenhauer's saying, 'A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills,' has been a real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life's hardships, my own and others', and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance."

This determinism appalled some friends such as Max Born, who thought it completely undermined the foundations of human morality. "I cannot understand how you can combine an entirely mechanistic universe with the freedom of the ethical individual," he wrote Einstein. "To me a deterministic world is quite abhorrent. Maybe you are right, and the world is that way, as you say. But at the moment it does not really look like it in physics--and even less so in the rest of the world."

For Born, quantum uncertainty provided an escape from this dilemma. Like some philosophers of the time, he latched onto the indeterminacy that was inherent in quantum mechanics to resolve "the discrepancy between ethical freedom and strict natural laws."

Born explained the issue to his wife Hedwig, who was always eager to debate Einstein. She told Einstein that, like him, she was "unable to believe in a 'dice-playing' God." In other words, unlike her husband, she rejected quantum mechanics' view that the universe was based on uncertainties and probabilities. But, she added, "nor am I able to imagine that you believe--as Max has told me--that your 'complete rule of law' means that everything is predetermined, for example whether I am going to have my child inoculated." It would mean, she pointed out, the end of all moral behavior.

But Einstein's answer was to look upon free will as something that was useful, indeed necessary, for a civilized society, because it caused people to take responsibility for their own actions. "I am compelled to act as if free will existed," he explained, "because if I wish to live in a civilized society I must act responsibly." He could even hold people responsible for their good or evil, since that was both a pragmatic and sensible approach to life, while still believing intellectually that everyone's actions were predetermined. "I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime," he said, "but I prefer not to take tea with him."

The foundation of morality, he believed, was rising above the "merely personal" to live in a way that benefited humanity. He dedicated himself to the cause of world peace and, after encouraging the U.S. to build the atom bomb to defeat Hitler, worked diligently to find ways to control such weapons. He raised money to help fellow refugees, spoke out for racial justice and publicly stood up for those who were victims of McCarthyism. And he tried to live with a humor, humility, simplicity and geniality even as he became one of the most famous faces on the planet.

For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the world was comprehensible, that it followed laws, was worthy of awe.

From Einstein by Walter Isaacson. © 2007 by Walter Isaacson. To be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

Sunday, April 8, 2007

156)"The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event..."

I picked out what I think are some fascinating quotes from my previous post(no. 155) by the Jewish scientist Dr. Sharon Moalem and showcase them in this post along with some key sayings by our present Imam(Aga Khan IV), previous Imam(Aga Khan III) as well as other well-known scientists and writers, for your viewing pleasure:

Dr. Sharon Moalem:
"There wasn't, like, a flash. It was a slow process, sparked by long hours in the lab, and the realization that life is in a constant state of creation, and that there was a unifying force in the things I was studying -- whether you call it nature or God," says Dr. Moalem, who is now 33.

The bigger picture, he came to feel, involves God. "Everything that exists is in essence a part of God, a universal creation that is still continually unfolding and evolving."

He says he doesn't see God as a Zeus-like deity who throws down lightning but as the force that permeates all of existence, both the known and the unknown aspects of the universe.

He doesn't see any conflict between God and evolution. "Evolution is just another way creation is continuously unfolding."

He dislikes the notion that scientists are either enlightened and don't believe in God, or are a throwback to a time of ignorance. He does not think science should take on the markings of a religion."If you are using science not as a tool, but as a world view, you run the risk of shutting out something you can't measure. Just because you can't measure it doesn't mean it doesn't exist."Journeys -- both spiritual and scientific -- are defined in part by their starting points.

If Dr. Moalem had been brought up in an Orthodox household, he might have rebelled against religion, or kept that part of his life separate from his work, rather than turning to God to help explain the connectedness and complexity of life he discovered as an evolutionary biologist.
Globe and Mail, Saturday, April 7th 2007

Indeed, one strength of Islam has always lain in its belief that creation is not static but continuous, that through scientific and other endeavours, God has opened and continues to open new windows for us to see the marvels of His creation (Aga Khan IV, Speech, Aga Khan University, 16 March 1983)

Islam is fundamentally in its very nature a natural religion. Throughout the Quran God’s signs (Ayats) are referred to as the natural phenomenon, the law and order of the universe, the exactitudes and consequences of the relations between natural phenomenon in cause and effect. Over and over, the stars, sun, moon, earthquakes, fruits of the earth and trees are mentioned as the signs of divine power, divine law and divine order. Even in the Ayeh of Noor, divine is referred to as the natural phenomenon of light and even references are made to the fruit of the earth(Aga Khan III, 1952, 'What have we forgotten in Islam?')

....the outer universe interpreted as an infinite reality of matter, as a mirror of an eternal spirit, or indeed (as Spinoza later said) an absolute existence of which matter and spirit alike are but two of infinite modes and facets(Aga Khan III, London, U.K., 1936)

There is a fundamental difference between the Jewish idea of creation and that of Islam. The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine will (Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).

Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God. (Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).

Imam Hassan has explained the Islamic doctrine of God and the Universe by analogy with the sun and its reflection in the pool of a fountain; there is certainly a reflection or image of the sun, but with what poverty and with what little reality; how small and pale is the likeness between this impalpable image and the immense, blazing, white-hot glory of the celestial sphere itself. Allah is the sun; and the Universe, as we know it in all its magnitude, and time, with its power, are nothing more than the reflection of the Absolute in the mirror of the fountain (Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).

It is my belief -- and because it is a belief, you can discuss it but not disprove it -- that there is a great Spiritual Power and that there is a spark of that spiritual power within each of us. And I believe that there is a spark of the same spiritual power in all life.
-- Jane Goodall, chimpanzee-behaviour expert, environmentalist, animal-rights activist, author of Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey.

You use the tools of science to understand how nature works, but you also recognize that there are things outside of nature, namely God, for which the tools of science are not well designed to derive truth. The middle-ground position is that there is more than one way to find truth, and a fully formed effort to try to answer the most important questions would not limit you to the kinds of questions that science can answer, especially the eternal one: Why are we all here, anyway?
-- Francis Collins, geneticist, Christian, director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. . . . His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work. . . .
-- Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist (1879-1955), did not believe in a personal God, is best known for his theories of relativity.

Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe." Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy," then you can find God in a lump of coal.
-- Steven Weinberg, 1979 winner of the Nobel prize for physics, atheist, author of Dreams of a Final Theory.
Steven Weinberg's co-winner of the 1979 Nobel prize for Physics was the Pakistani scientist Abdus Salam, about whom I have blogged here:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/abdus-salaam-1979-nobel-laureate-in.html

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.
-- Richard Dawkins, Oxford University evolutionary biologist, atheist, author of The God Delusion.

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

Saturday, April 7, 2007

155)"Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine Will."

Today's Globe and Mail(Canada's national newspaper) has an illuminating article on the link between scientists and religion and gives us the example of a Christian and a Jewish scientist and how their science interacted with their religion and vice versa.

For Shia Ismaili Muslims the link between science and religion is simple and cogent. Four posts I have made in the past should help to inform their approach to this important discussion:

http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/135the-uninterrupted-thread-of-search.html

http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/129quotes-of-aga-khan-4-consolidated.html

http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/133timeless-sayings-of-aga-khan-iii.html

http://easynash.blogspot.com/2006/12/abu-yakub-al-sijistani-cosmologist.html

In mysterious ways
Globe and Mail
Saturday, April 7th 2007

Science and faith have clashed from the days of Galileo to today. But the outcome is not always what you may expect: A biologist finds God. A biblical historian loses his religion. ANNE McILROY tells their tales

ANNE MCILROY

Bart Ehrman was a believer. An evangelical Christian, he learned Greek, Coptic and paleography -- the study of ancient handwriting -- to analyze New Testament documents. Today, he chairs the University of North Carolina religious-studies department, where he investigates the forgery of Christian documents in the second and third centuries. But he no longer has Jesus in his heart, and no longer goes to church.

Sharon Moalem was not religious when he began to study evolution in microbes, plants, animals and humans. Today, he is at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where he investigates the role bacteria play in Crohn's disease, a digestive-tract disorder. He found God through science. He has become an Orthodox Jew who attends weekly services, and doesn't use his computer, BlackBerry or any electric devices on the Sabbath.

Research and religion have collided in the public realm since Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633 for teaching that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Similar clashes make headlines today -- the debate over teaching evolution in U.S. classrooms, restrictions on stem-cell research, or the meaning of archeological finds such as the "lost gospel of Judas" that challenge the story of Jesus as told in the Bible.

But the God-versus-science debate also can cause inner turmoil for researchers, especially when their discoveries challenge their own long-held beliefs. A study in the journal Nature found that mathematicians were the most likely among scientists to believe in a personal God and an afterlife, physicists and astronomers less so. Over all, roughly 60 per cent of the natural scientists surveyed were not believers, and 40 per cent were.

A new book, Practicing Science, Living Faith, reflects the growing academic interest in how scientists reconcile their spiritual life with their work. It presents interviews with a dozen researchers, including chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall, who talks about the importance of recognizing the "spark of spirit" in all creatures.

But none of the 12 experienced as extreme a spiritual journey as Dr. Ehrman, the New Testament scholar whose work slowly chipped away at the foundation of his faith, or Dr. Moalem, the evolutionary biologist who was so awed and inspired by the complexity of life that he turned to a force he could sense, but not see or measure, for an explanation.

Dr. Ehrman was brought up in Kansas, where his family attended weekly services at an Episcopalian church. As a teenager, he felt what he describes as "an emptiness inside that nothing seemed to fill." He started attending the Campus Life Youth for Christ Club and was "born again" at the age of 15.

When he graduated from high school in 1973, he went to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Drinking, smoking, movies and dancing were forbidden, but there was plenty of Bible study.
At the end of his three-year diploma, he decided he wanted to be a Christian scholar, but in a secular university. He went to Wheaton College, near Chicago, where he learned Greek and got interested in New Testament manuscripts.

He had started his postsecondary education believing that the New Testament was the word of God. But he was troubled by the fact that the original manuscripts have not survived -- only copies, mostly made many centuries after Jesus died.

If God had wanted people to hear his words, he wondered, why hadn't he allowed the originals to survive? "Why would He inspire it if He didn't preserve it?"

From Chicago, he went to New Jersey and Princeton University, where his doctoral research forced him to accept that there were errors and discrepancies in the Bible. For example, different chapters offered contradictory accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the events being marked by Christians around the world this weekend with the celebration of Easter.

"What got me was the enormity of the differences that you find in the manuscripts. That started chiselling away at my faith. I didn't think that God dictated every word, but that I thought that God had guided the authors," says Dr Ehrman, now 51.

In 1983, Dr. Ehrman was teaching a class at Rutgers University on the problem of suffering in the biblical tradition, and brought in pictures of starving children in Ethiopia. But he was more affected by the images than his students were.

"My faith in the Bible had already been challenged by my research, and now I was confronted by the question of how there could be a God in charge of this world, given the state of things."
He continued attending church for another decade, joining an Episcopalian congregation when he moved to North Carolina. But work eroded what was left of his faith.

"The more I did historical research, the more I realized what I had always accepted as Christianity was something that had developed over time. It wasn't the form of religion that was there at the very beginning, and it wasn't the religion that Jesus himself had."

He was in church one Sunday in the early 1990s, reciting the Nicene Creed, a profession of Christian faith, when he realized that he believed only a small fraction of it -- the description of how Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate, died and was buried -- and nothing else.

"[For] the rest, I was just kind of mouthing the words, and I realized, 'I don't really belong here.' "

He has never been back and says he is an agnostic, unsure if God exists. It is a sore point with some family members who are still born-again Christians. "We talk about baseball or basketball," he says.

His children from his first marriage are now adults and have become atheists. But his present wife goes to church and wishes he would attend too.

He told a short version of his story as an introduction to his 2005 book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, which became a bestseller. Now, he's writing an entire book chronicling his loss of faith.

But Dr. Ehrman doesn't feel out of place in his department. He says none of his colleagues are religious: "Religious-studies departments are notorious. It is quite different from divinity school, where you have people who are believers training other people to be believers."

When Sharon Moalem was a teenager growing up in Toronto, he went to synagogue once a year with his father but had little interest in religion. He looked to science for answers to the big questions in his life, such as why his beloved grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, had been stricken with Alzheimer's.

He studied biology at the University of Guelph and then moved to the University of Toronto for graduate school, where he started investigating the evolution of genes that cause disease.
Why would genes that make us sick -- that contribute to Alzheimer's or high cholesterol -- be passed down from generation to generation? Is it possible that they have a dual nature and were somehow helpful to our ancestors, allowing them to survive plagues, ice ages and other calamities?

Those questions would guide a promising scientific career -- and lead to his first book, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease, released this year. But they also would lead the young researcher on an unexpected spiritual journey.

"There wasn't, like, a flash. It was a slow process, sparked by long hours in the lab, and the realization that life is in a constant state of creation, and that there was a unifying force in the things I was studying -- whether you call it nature or God," says Dr. Moalem, who is now 33.

One of those connections was a link between Alzheimer's and hemochromatosis, an inherited condition that causes organs such as the liver and heart to hoard iron. His grandfather had suffered from it long before he got Alzheimer's. Dr. Moalem's research showed that the hemochromatosis may have put his grandfather at increased risk of getting the degenerative brain disease.

He wondered why those genes would be so common? Why would up to 40 per cent of the population in Europe be carriers?

He built a case that the hemochromatosis genes protected people from the bubonic plague, because it kept the iron in their bodies out of reach from bacteria, which need the metal to fuel their invasive lives. The gene first emerged 60 to 70 generations ago, around 600 to 1100 AD, when the Black Death was ravaging Europe.

But the medical community resisted the idea that the genes that cause or contribute to disease today might have been helpful to our ancestors through plagues and other calamities.

"The more I studied, the more it came across that disease might be protective. And I thought, if I got this wrong, if medical science got this wrong, what else aren't we understanding fully? Many things seem negative and awful, but there is actually a bigger picture to it."

The bigger picture, he came to feel, involves God. "Everything that exists is in essence a part of God, a universal creation that is still continually unfolding and evolving."

When he was 29, Dr. Moalem sought out organized religion and was attracted to Orthodox practices because of the discipline. He keeps kosher and attends weekly religious services, but has not settled yet on a synagogue in Manhattan, where he is finishing his medical degree and doing research.

He has to take the Sabbath off. "I think it offered that time to reflect on the bigger questions," he says.

He says he doesn't see God as a Zeus-like deity who throws down lightning but as the force that permeates all of existence, both the known and the unknown aspects of the universe.

He no longer questions why God would allow his grandfather to have suffered and died from Alzheimer's. "Some people may look at the genes linked to Alzheimer's or other serious diseases as a curse or divine retribution. A materialist would tell you, 'No, the body is a machine that is malfunctioning.'

"My view is, things are working exactly as they should. It is an evolutionary compromise that allows us to still be around."

It hasn't changed his work as a scientist. His colleagues don't treat him differently, although he can't talk to them on the phone or via e-mail on the Sabbath.

He doesn't see any conflict between God and evolution. "Evolution is just another way creation is continuously unfolding."

He dislikes the notion that scientists are either enlightened and don't believe in God, or are a throwback to a time of ignorance. He does not think science should take on the markings of a religion.

"If you are using science not as a tool, but as a world view, you run the risk of shutting out something you can't measure. Just because you can't measure it doesn't mean it doesn't exist."
Journeys -- both spiritual and scientific -- are defined in part by their starting points. If Dr. Ehrman had not believed the Bible to be the unerring word of God, his scholarship might not have had such a profound impact on his faith.

Many Christians choose to focus on the messages in the Bible, to see it as parable, and are unperturbed by its contradictions, or by the heavy editing that has changed the gospels of the New Testament over the centuries.

But for Dr. Ehrman, having an historical understanding of where the doctrines and teachings of Christianity came from deprived them of their divine status. Did he learn too much?

"I don't think it is possible to learn too much," he says.

If Dr. Moalem had been brought up in an Orthodox household, he might have rebelled against religion, or kept that part of his life separate from his work, rather than turning to God to help explain the connectedness and complexity of life he discovered as an evolutionary biologist.

Becoming more spiritual has made him a better scientist, he says, more open to anything he may encounter in the lab. "It sparks the wonder and amazement that I have that keeps my work inspired . . . and not suffocated," he says. "It is the 'wow' factor: There is more to the world than how it appears."

Anne McIlroy is The Globe and Mail's science reporter.

Are you there, God? It's me, Einstein

"It is my belief -- and because it is a belief, you can discuss it but not disprove it -- that there is a great Spiritual Power and that there is a spark of that spiritual power within each of us. And I believe that there is a spark of the same spiritual power in all life."
-- Jane Goodall, chimpanzee-behaviour expert, environmentalist, animal-rights activist, author of Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey.

"You use the tools of science to understand how nature works, but you also recognize that there are things outside of nature, namely God, for which the tools of science are not well designed to derive truth. The middle-ground position is that there is more than one way to find truth, and a fully formed effort to try to answer the most important questions would not limit you to the kinds of questions that science can answer, especially the eternal one: Why are we all here, anyway?"
-- Francis Collins, geneticist, Christian, director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

"The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. . . . His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work. . . ."
-- Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist (1879-1955), did not believe in a personal God, is best known for his theories of relativity.

"Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe." Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy," then you can find God in a lump of coal."
-- Steven Weinberg, 1979 winner of the Nobel prize for physics, atheist, author of Dreams of a Final Theory.

"As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect."
-- Richard Dawkins, Oxford University evolutionary biologist, atheist, author of The God Delusion.

-- Anne McIlroy

easynash

Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4.
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3

The link between Science and Religion in Islam